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Posts Tagged ‘Courtyard studios open weekend’

Back in Scotland…..and painting again…..take 2!

I actually wrote this blog yesterday evening but after 3 hours my computer crashed and I somehow lost the whole document! So here we go again.

Well then, that’s us back in sunny Scotland and back to business as usual at the studio. We arrived back from Brazil after a very long journey, at about 01.00 last Thursday morning. Wow, quite a trip, especially as only about two weeks before I been bumbling along getting work ready for the Harbour Arts Centre show in November and planning the big studio tidy-up before the Courtyard Studios Open Weekend on 4th / 5th October.

On the initial tour of the Matarazzo Hospital exhibition

On the initial tour of the Matarazzo Hospital exhibition

Then, right out of the blue I get an email from a company in Brazil asking if I can get down to Sao Paulo for a few days before October 12th. To be honest, I didn’t really know quite what to make of it as sadly there are a lot of internet scams aimed at artists these days. I decided to send it to John who not only does all the admin for this website but also acts as my agent and advisor. He very kindly checked it out and got back to me the next day saying that all was OK and that if I was prepared to rush down to Sao Paulo at short notice, he’d try and fix everything with the people in Brazil.

Sketching the old buildings

Sketching the old buildings

Well, it was a hectic few days with emails winging there way back and forth between John, (who is based in Bogota), Lucila (the lady organising the trip in Sao Paulo) and I. Finally on Tuesday 7th we got the email from Brazil saying all was “go” and that they’d be booking the flights and hotel and getting back to us. Things in the Salmon / Groves house were somewhat crazy at this stage as we suddenly had to get everything arranged to go away the following evening ….Nita had to arrange time off from work, we had to get the cat to the cattery, (he wasn’t amused) and we also had to get everything packed. In the end the flight left Edinburgh at 06.00 Thursday morning and so it wasn’t quite as mad a rush as we’d thought ….but pretty mad all the same!

In the Matarazzo Hospital

In the Matarazzo Hospital

I had been invited to travel to Sao Paulo to take part in a large arts project in the city. The project involves creating a new art, culture and tourism centre on the site of the old un-used Matarazzo hospital. Before the work starts though it had been decided that they would hold a large contemporary art exhibition in the grounds and buildings of this fine old hospital. The exhibition ended on Sunday 12th October and one of the sponsors thought it would be a great idea to invite a professional artist who was visually impaired to visit the exhibition and to then create a small series of paintings capturing the spirit of the place and work. I was the lucky person to be invited.

A quick hop took us to Amsterdam and then we had the eleven and a half hour haul down to Sao Paulo. Phew, was I glad to get off that plane or what?! Thankfully we were met by a very nice chap called Gilsom who drove us the 45 minutes into the city and our hotel.

Friday proved a very busy one as we met up with a representative of the company sponsoring my trip (Absolut Elyx) and were then given a guided tour around the exhibition…..being followed the whole way by a small film crew who were there to record the meeting for the company. The afternoon found me being interviewed for one of the Sao Paulo daily newspapers. After that I was able to get down to some work and expertly guided as usual by Nita, I spent the rest of Friday and a good chunk of Saturday and Monday wandering around the exhibition, just looking, photographing, sketching and just taking everything in ….in short, doing exactly what I do when we’re in the hills. After 4 hours in very hot conditions on Monday (it was 38° C) I decided that I’d probably got enough to work with and we retreated to the cool of our very posh air conditioned hotel ….and finished with a cold beer!

One of the many exhibits

One of the many exhibits

We flew back the following day, but with a nine hour wait in Paris for the connecting flight to Edinburgh ….hence the 01.00 arrival home in Irvine on Thursday morning. Suffice to say that we were a little whacked by the time we finally put our heads down and only surfaced mid morning for an hour or so in order to go claim our cat back from the cattery…….he wasn’t amused!

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been all the way to Brazil and back ….perhaps it was just a dream? But no! We have the packet of Brazil nuts from the hotel mini-bar to prove it! Now the interesting bit begins…..I have five paintings to complete by late February.

I have my attention back on the Harbour Arts Centre exhibition and the big drawing project there in November / December, but reckon I’ll probably do the smaller Brazil paintings in the evenings after I’ve finished the days work on the big graphite drawing. I’ll then be able to do the final larger painting once the HAC show is over at the end of the first week in January. The finished Brazil paintings are to be shipped back to Sao Paulo and then put in a gallery and auctioned to raise funds for the on-going project. I’ll keep you updated on all this work … doubt that I’ll be spending much time at home over the next few months. Watch this space.

Getting ready for the: Courtyard Studios Open Weekend

Getting ready for the: Courtyard Studios Open Weekend, Saturday / Sunday 4th / 5th October 2014

I’m really busy at the moment getting everything arranged for my exhibition and drawing project starting at the end of November. As such, I decided a few days ago that instead of spending a whole week (as usual) getting the studio tidy and clean, ready for our annual Open Studios Weekend next Saturday and Sunday, I’d carry on working up until Wednesday evening and then have two mad, mad days rushing around getting everything ready.

Well, that was the plan. Yesterday however, it changed. I had a somewhat disruptive few hours and really wasn’t concentrating on the painting I was working on. This is always dangerous and it’s much better to stop working than to try and carry on ….and inevitably wreck the piece of work you’re doing. So, with several hours of the afternoon to go, I decided to start clearing all the stuff (boxes of pastels, tools, picture hanging cord, rolls of tape, boxes of nails, loose pieces of paper, old sketches……etc, etc , etc) off the top of my main table. This is always an onerous job as I only tackle it once a year…..yes; you’ve guessed it, the week before the Open Studios Weekend! Of course once I started it kind of created a chain reaction. Before I left the studio last night, my simple table-top tidying had already spread to moving paintings!

As you know, I’ve been working on three 120 x 120 cm canvases, two of which are finished and the third that still needs plenty of work. This final painting will have to be packed away in the large box the original canvas arrived in. The problem is that I was planning to do some more work on it today, leaving a surface of wet oil paint. In order to make sure that I’m not tempted to reach for the paint brush, I took the canvas off the wall yesterday and it’ll be boxed up today! So much for my plan to carry on painting until the middle of the week! That said, I do have several small acrylic and pastel paintings on the go and so may well get a day or two working on them. I’ll just have to remember not to pack away my acrylic paints.

This then is the run up to the Open Weekend. It’s always a bit crazy but thankfully this year Stephanie has taken on the job of organising the event and she is doing a great job. All I have to do is get my own space ready and myself down to the studio ready for an 11am start next Saturday morning. It should be a very good event this year with 14 out of the 17 artists taking part. This will mean a lot of very different work to see including all kinds of paintings and drawings, ceramics, jewellery, photography, hand book-binding and live music. Three of the artists will be running a workshop, talk or demonstration during the weekend…..check out the WASPS website for details. As usual the event is free to enter and everyone is welcome. We’re close to several very good bars, restaurants and cafes and the Magnum Sports Centre is just 2 minutes walk away ….so you can make a fine afternoon of it. Hopefully we’ll see some of you next weekend. Please spread the word. Thank you.

Courtyard Studios Open Weekend
Saturday 4th October, 11 am – 5 pm
Sunday 5th October, 12 noon – 5 pm

Courtyard Studios, 128 Harbour St, Irvine, Ayrshire, KA12 8PZ

Starting the pre Open Studios Weekend tidy-up!

Starting the pre Open Studios Weekend tidy-up!

-o-o-o-o-o-

‘On Beinn a’ Ghlo’

274  'On Beinn a' Ghlo', Acrylic & Pastel, 2013, 80 x 80 cm

‘On Beinn a’ Ghlo’

‘On Beinn a’ Ghlo’, Acrylic & Pastel, 2013, 80 x 80 cm

As you’ll see if you read the current blog, my mind is firmly on our forthcoming Courtyard Studios Open Weekend and as it suggests, it can be quite stressful getting everything organised.  At such times however, I have to remind myself why I enjoy the event so much and why it is so good for my own practice and the Courtyard as a whole.  The event is an excellent way to promote the Courtyard Studios as a centre for professional and quality art in the region as well as a great opportunity for visitors to view and buy the very latest work being produced here.

So then, with that in mind, I thought of this painting.  It was bought by a lady and gentleman from Glasgow at the start of our Open Studios weekend last year and I’m very glad to say they visited my studio again a few months ago and are still enjoying this scene from Beinn a’ Ghlo.

I’m currently working on several new pieces which should be ready for this year’s event on Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th October.  Open: Saturday 4th, 11am – 5pm, Sunday5th 12 noon – 5pm.  Entry free, all visitors welcome.  I hope you can get along to see some of my new paintings.

…..about the Courtyard Open Studios Weekend

Courtyard Studios, Irvine

Courtyard Studios, Irvine

I’ve been awake for the last few hours trying to decide what to do about this years Courtyard Studios Open Weekend.   As you probably know if you’ve been following the last 234 blogs, every year we have an Open Studios Weekend.  This always takes place on the first weekend of October…..this year, (our 12th such event I think) will be on Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th October.

The event was originally set up by WASPS back in 2002 I think, with each of their studio buildings taking part.  I’ve obviously only been involved with the Courtyard in Irvine but, over the years, we’ve slowly honed the event to meet our needs and it has generally been a very worth while thing to do, especially in terms of promoting the Courtyard as a venue for professional and quality arts in the region, and to some degree, as a means of creating opportunities and sales for the participating artists.

A successful event each year doesn’t however just happen, it takes a lot of hard work organising and promoting it. Over the years first with WASPS help and then more recently off our own backs, we’ve created something that people in the area know about and support ….in the last couple of years we’ve had close on 300 visitors through the door over each of the weekends……but as I say, it does take a lot of work.   In the past Anita and I have always taken an active part in helping to organise the event at the Courtyard and we’d said that we’d do the same again this year.  However, back in July WASPS announced that they were developing the event further  this year with plans for extra money for workshops, artists talks and promotion and that they’d be looking for an official ‘Open studios rep to co-ordinate things  this year.  This will involve a lot more work than normal for whoever does the job.

As you know, I have been busy recently getting paintings ready for The Biscuit Factory autumn exhibition and now that they’re away, I have to put most of my efforts into preparing for the big drawing event and exhibition that I’m holding at the Harbour Arts Centre starting on 27th November.  This is still three months away but there is a huge amount (both creative and organisational) to be done for it.  As such, I told those attending the Open Studios weekend meetings, that I’d not be able to take on the extra work now involved in being official rep for the event and asked that someone else volunteer to do  it this year.

Surprise, surprise however, just yesterday Anita and I received an email from WASPS asking what was happening re the Open Studios Weekend at the Courtyard and whether we were going to be co-ordinating things again this year and as such, act as reps for the event.   This is why I’ve been awake half the night!  I really can’t take on the extra work now involved this year and it would be great if one of my colleagues would pick up the reigns.  Here’s hoping…..!   Oh well, whatever happens, we’ll get there in the end and it will as usual be a great event, so make sure you put it down in your diary:

Courtyard Studios Open Weekend

Saturday 4th / Sunday 5th October 2014

Open: Saturday 11 am – 5pm, Sunday 12 noon – 5pm

Hope to see some of you there.

The big tidy-up!

The annual Courtyard Studios Open Weekend isn’t just a great opportunity to promote and sell my work ….it is, by necessity, a great opportunity to clean, tidy and generally re-organise the studio.  I’d like to think I’d do this periodically even without the excuse of getting the studio ready for the Open Weekend once a year ….but well……I guess in all honesty, I would always prefer to paint and the tidying would get put off ….and off and off!

Mayhem in the Studio tidy-up

Mayhem in the Studio tidy-up

The thing is, when and how to do the ‘big tidy’.  There seems to be two opposing lines of thought on this subject.  There are those, (and I’ve been included in this camp before) that leave it to the last minute and have a mad ….and I mean MAD, long day on the Friday before the Open Weekend.  Our studio rep, Brian, is going for this option this year apparently, but I doubt that he can really come close to matching a former tenant, Jamie.  He really did leave it to the last minute and he, being a very prolific painter, really did have a lot of tidying to do each year.  When all the rest of us plodded wearily home around eight or nine O’clock on the Friday evening, Jamie studio would be a hive of activity with much moving of paintings, climbing of step ladders and cursing!  By all accounts this quite often went on into the early hours of the morning.  All credit to him though, he was always there with his studio open on the dot of eleven the next morning waiting for the first visitors….and his studio would be looking great.

The other option, and this is the one I’ve gone for this year, is to take several days getting the studio ready.  It means of course, you don’t get any actual painting done, but it is a bit more relaxed and certainly less stressful.  I started clearing the top of one of my tables on Monday afternoon, did a little bit more on Tuesday and then got into the swing of it properly, yesterday.  I did say to Nita though, that doing it this way, the job does tend to expand to fit the time!  Indeed, yesterday after repainting the end walls, I spent many hours just moving paintings around ….and around before finally selecting and hanging five pieces.

Finally, yesterday evening, I repainted the floor at the far end of the studio.  This is usually the area where I do all my work and so was in a bad state.  Along with all the splashes of paint there was also a good covering of graphite after all the big drawings I’ve been doing.  Needless to say, I painted myself away from the sink which I’d left full of soapy water to clean the brush in!  Hopefully the floor will be dry when I get in later today and I can start moving all the stuff currently stacked everywhere in the front section of the studio, onto the clean floor at the back. Once this is done, I can start painting the main wall and hanging pictures on that.  If I can get this done by this evening I’ll have all Friday to do the final tidying and then go around fixing labels, cleaning picture glass etc.

It always seems a bit daunting when everything is in disarray, but once you get a few paintings up and a bit of the floor looking clean (ish), it all seems worth it.  This year I do actually have a cut off point on Friday evening.  A former college friend of mine is calling in at eight o’clock on Friday evening on his way up to see his mum who lives on the Isle of Bute.  We’ve assured him we’ll both have our studios ready by eight so that we can all go off for a meal in our local Indian restaurant.  It’ll be a nice way to finish off the week of tidying.

A lot of work still to do

A lot of work still to do

Anyway, if you live in the area do come down to the Courtyard studios this weekend.  There will be 12 of us taking part and it’s a great opportunity to see the very latest work by some of Ayrshire’s leading artists and makers…..including, painting, drawing, photography, ceramics, stained glass, hand book-binding and jewellery.  Hope to see some of you there.

‘Sunlight and Stones, Beinn a’ Ghlo’

65-sunlight-stones-beinn-a-ghlo-acrylic-pastel-2007-58-x-34cm

‘Sunlight & Stones, Beinn a’ Ghlo’

‘Sunlight and Stones, Beinn a’ Ghlo’, Acrylic & Pastel, 2007, 58 x 34 cm

The paintings I’m currently doing in oil, originate from this small acrylic and pastel piece I did back in 2007.  At the time I felt that this was a move forward, away from the very heavy use of pastel and towards a bolder composition.  I particularly liked the simple broad bands of colour and mark and now, 5 years on, I’m exploring the possibilities that this painting first suggested.

I always liked this piece; indeed, it was one of the 10 pieces I included in my application for the Jolomo Award 2009.  I spent much time trying to work out the best 10 pieces to use for my application but this piece was never in doubt.  The painting was bought a couple of years ago ….so if you’re reading this; I hope you’re still enjoying it.

Why not come along to the Courtyard Studios Open Weekend on Saturday 6th / Sunday 7th October where you’ll be able to see my latest paintings.  Open Saturday11 am – 5pm, Sunday 12 noon – 5pm.

To see some of my new paintings right now …check out this weeks blog and last weeks too.

‘On Rannoch Moor’

on-rannoch-moor-acrylic-pastel-2011-76-x-23-cm

‘On Rannoch Moor’, Acrylic & Pastel, 2011, 76 x 23 cm

This is one of the paintings I had on display at the Courtyard Studios Open Weekend last weekend.  It is now wrapped and boxed along with 18 other paintings, awaiting collection by the courier, for the journey to Speyer.   I had a very good response to these new paintings and it was particularly good seeing them up on the wall together for the first time.  A number of people commented that I was using brighter colours and I think they may be right …although it has not been a conscious decision, more just a case of my getting more confident with using colours.  This is certainly one of the brightest paintings that I’ve done of Rannoch Moor and although it can be a dark and brooding place in poor weather, when the sun comes out it can be full of colour.

My exhibition in Speyer opens on Friday 21st October and after seeing some of these paintings together for the first time last weekend, I think it should be quite a good show.  I hope you can get to see it.  I’ll be having the exhibition photographed so you’ll be able to see it on-line in a few weeks time.

Changes

Open weekend studio J

Open weekend studio J

For the last few days the news seems to have been full of the autumn ‘heat wave’ and record temperatures for September and October.  That’s all very well if you’re one of those folk living in England or Wales…if you live in Ayrshire and no doubt much of the west of Scotland or Northern Ireland…well, it’s not been quite so good.

As you know from my previous blogs and posts on Face Book, this weekend is the WASPS Studios Open Weekend and yesterday I awoke to find the skies dark and the rain teeming down.  And it didn’t get any better through the rest of the day..it just rained and rained and rained.  Not surprisingly visitor numbers were down ….well, they were the worst at the Courtyard for any single day since we started the Open Studios Weekends six or seven years ago.  I’m not sure of the exact number but it was in the region of 35 I guess. Seeing as we normally get around 200 visitors over the two days we’ve got a lot of catching up to do today.   However, considering the day long deluge, it really was quite good that we got 35 visitors yesterday and everyone who donned their hats and coats and came down to the studios deserves a medal I think …so a big thanks to all of those.

Open weekend studio JWhen I got up this morning at about 06.45 it was still chucking it down with rain and as the light increased, things looked no different from yesterday!  However, it’s now about 08.45 and I do believe it’s just stopped ..I can hear some birds singing in the garden so perhaps they sense a change to slightly better brighter conditions later in the day …let’s hope so.  The studios are open again today from noon until 5pm so with a bit of luck we’ll see a lot more people this afternoon.

The weather though isn’t the only thing to change this week.  Last weekend I arrived at my studio to find a very bad pong emanating from somewhere under the floor boards or from behind a wall cavity.  Very unpleasant and I had to work all last weekend with the front door wide open.  As I said to a couple of local ladies who stopped to look in through the front door, ‘I think we have a dead ‘mouse’ under the floor boards’.  As the weekend progressed it became patently obvious that the ‘mouse’ should have been spelt ‘rat’!  Ahhhhhh.

Thankfully, there are several empty studio spaces at the moment and head office agreed for me to move into one of these temporarily while they decided what to do …and most importantly, for the period of the Open Weekend.  So, much moving of gear, especially as builders arrived on Wednesday to take up part of the floor in search of the culprit….which they couldn’t find.  Since then, the pest man has been, the builders have been back again and the architect is now involved.  It really is a case of trying to find how the thing got into the wall or floor space.  Oh well, as one of my colleagues said, ‘every rat has a silver lining’!  The studio I moved into for the Open Weekend, is superb.  It’s in the main courtyard and is twice the size of my current space.  Within a day of moving in, I realised that I wanted to make the move permanent.  I’ve been doing this slightly larger work this summer and Studio E was becoming very congested with all the paintings and materials.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried ‘swinging that cat’ the other week …it might have caught the rat!

Open weekend studio JOpen weekend studio J

Anyway, to cut a long story short …I’ve asked head office to let me change studios immediately and so I’ll start moving the rest of my gear into studio J on Monday.  It’s going to be great having more space although I’ll miss the wonderful view I had out over the river and saltings …but sometimes you just have to move on …and I think all things considered, that this is the right thing to do.

The work looks great on the wall so hopefully a good few people will get to see it and the new studio, later today.   Oh, and by the way, for all of you down south in your shades and flip flops …have pity on us up here …it’s just started raining heavily again!

A busy week

Courtyard Studio Artists 2010

Courtyard Studio Artists 2010

To say it’s been busy this week is a bit of an understatement. Of course it is the perfect excuse for why this blog is so late, ….well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

As I’ve already said in past blogs, I’m busy working on six paintings for an exhibition with Scotlandart.com at their Edinburgh gallery starting at the end of October. These paintings have to be ready and delivered in about two weeks. They’re coming on well. Two are finished and framed, two more are finished and just need putting into their frames and two are well under way and hopefully will be finished by the end of the week. I’m pleased with the four completed ones and they’ve been getting quite a lot of interest from visitors to the studio …so hopefully some of these people may go to see the exhibition once it opens.

All painting stopped on Monday evening as on Tuesday I had to travel down to London for the private view of the ‘Jolomo Landscape Painting Awards 2009 Finalists Exhibition – One Year On’. This was held at the Royal Opera Arcade Gallery in Pall-mall and luckily the organiser had managed to book us a room at the Civil Service Club not far away. It was a good journey down by train and very quick too …just five hours from Irvine to Euston and so we didn’t have to set off too early and arrived in ample time to get to the gallery by 6.30pm. It was a busy event and a very enjoyable evening. It seemed to go well with lots of interest and several paintings sold …so it’ll be interesting to hear how the remainder of the week long exhibition went. These events are always pretty tiring I find and so by half past nine we were in need of food and a beer and found somewhere just off of Trafalgar Square to recover and relax .

As we were holding our studio open weekend at the Courtyard at the weekend, there was no time for us to stay down in London to enjoy a few days of gallery visits and wandering the city. It was straight back to Scotland on Wednesday morning and a mad day and a half on Thursday and Friday morning, getting the studio ready for the weekend event. This is normally something that takes me around four days but Anita was on holiday all that week so she did a lot of work to help me. We just about got everything done by mid afternoon on Friday and then after a quick change we rushed for the train and headed over to Edinburgh for the preview of a group exhibition at the Gallery on the Corner ….in which a close friend, Lorraine Nicholson, was showing some of her photographs and paintings. It was a good show with some excellent work. The exhibition runs for two weeks so well worth a look if you’re in Edinburgh. The journey back wasn’t quite so good though. We managed to miss the half past eight train and the nine o’clock one was cancelled due to a lack of a driver. The half past nine train was then a little late leaving but at least got us back into Glasgow well in time to catch the eleven o’clock train to Irvine. We were back home by midnight …and it was at this point I decided that this blog would have to be late ….there was no way I was going to try and write it at that time of night!

We were back down the studio first thing on Saturday morning, hanging the last couple of paintings, putting labels up, sweeping the floor and going around with the spirit level checking that everything was straight. The first visitor arrived just on eleven and just as everything was completed.

It was a good weekend. The weather was fine and this brought out lots of people. I’m not sure of the exact numbers but I’d estimate around about two hundred over the course of the weekend …so pretty good. I have a couple of potential sales along with much interest …so I’m more than happy. I think most of the other twelve artists made sales or potential sales and I know one artist got a commission …so at the end yesterday evening we were all happy, if just a little tired.

Courtyard Studio Artists 2010

Courtyard Studio Artists 2010